Forum / 'On the Road'

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  Chris Okum

  Apr 30, 04:20pm

  Jack Kerouac was turned into an icon and his story absorbed into the collective American myth because his story was actually the apotheosis of the American dream, not the flip-side of it, as is commonly portrayed. 'Dig:' two strapping men in a car, traveling around the country, not a care in the world, just enough money for booze and broads, and more than enough brains to communicate their adventures in a style that mimicked their Benzedrine-fueled mojo. On the Road wasn't a rebuke to the straight life, it was a dare, or, more likely, an experiment which proved that it was only with a car and gas that a man could truly be free. That's why Kerouac turned out to be an advertiser's dream, because he represents an America that never has to worry about fuel or the compromises that come with having unlimited access to fuel. How different would On the Road have been had Dean and Sal travelled around the country in a bus? Or as hoboes, on a train? Then the story skids into desolate territory, it becomes about two men who are exempt from the fruits of post-War America, not two men who are thriving because of it. On the Road is not about Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, not about Sal and Dean, and not about the 'spirit' of America. On the Road is about the spirit of the car and what the car represents and how the car will become the center around which American life will swirl. On the Road could have been sponsored by General Motors. On the Road is one of the dangerous myths we keep telling ourselves in order to protect the notion that it is every American's God-given right to drive all day and all night and consume unlimited amounts of fossil fuels. Jack Kerouac thought he was writing a book about being on the margins of society, about being lost inside of an Empire, about not just ripping off the logic of the grey flannel suit, but setting the suit on fire, about the sacrifices of non-conformity. But what he ended up producing was exactly the opposite, which is a book about what the future of conformity looks, sounds, and smells like. And judging from how he lived the last ten years of his life, how utterly miserable and resentful he was of the kids who bought into his propaganda, it looks like he knew this all too well.

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  Dianne McKnight-Warren

  Apr 30, 08:27pm

  Many years ago I was the designated driver for a writers' conference because I had a car. Jack Kerouac's girlfriend was one of the writers I had to pick up at Logan airport in Boston and deliver somewhere. The seatbelts in my car didn't work and I apologized and she said she hated seatbelts.

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  David Ackley

  May 01, 01:16am

  I knew his cousin Paul, who lived in Nashua, NH where I hung out in high school, just up the river from Lowell. I don't remember anything he told me about Jack, except that they used to play together when they were kids. Still, On the Road! That was it! Goodbye, Holden Caulfield, hello Neil Cassidy.

  But the romance of the car started well before Kerouac. My father had it. I had it. And every boy in my high school had it. And I hate to admit it, at my age, and with all I know and loathe about what it has done to us, I still have it. But my children don't. so hopefully it'll pass away, unmourned and forgotten.

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  David Ackley

  May 03, 10:38pm

  I do think that Chris has rightly identified how pernicious the myth is perpetuated, heightened and justified by Kerouac, that there is somehow romance in the escapism that is the real truth of the car. But escapism isn't romance,or freedom, in fact it isn't even escape. It's just denial, impure and complex. And he is precisely right about Kerouac's fatalistic end, which is one of despair and surrender to the other addiction in which he sought escape. In his mother's shabby house in the back streets of Lowel... well, I won't go on, but if you knew Lowell, you'd know what the architecture of despair looks like.
  And by the way, if you as I did, found romance in the fey weak, floundering resistance of Holden Caulfield, you'd do better to read " A perfect Day for Bananafish," for the truth that Salinger struggled toward all his life, but couldn;t bring himself to accept and so tried desperately to conceal it from his audience, as well as from himself.

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  David Ackley

  May 04, 01:09am

  A clear-eyed attack on the mythology of the car is the chronically misunderstood Michael Mann's recent excellent film "Ferrari," where at one and the same time Mann shows us the beautiful, mesmerizing surfaces of these fantastic machines, and all gradually reveals the moral indifference, conniving, deception and sheer treachery that goes into the making of the spectacular cars, and the spectacle of racing. Penelope Cruz is wonderful as Ferrari's wife in letting her beauty be turned ugly to show the true effects on her of Ferrari's monomania.

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  Darryl Price

  May 05, 07:25pm

  I'm a retired bookseller and I can tell you, ON THE ROAD, was always the most stolen book in our inventory at any given time.

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  Chris Okum

  May 06, 06:49pm

  People have horrible taste in books. On the rare occasion that I see someone reading in public they're always reading books for people who hate reading books, like "The Great Gatsby," or, ridiculously, "Ulysses" or "Moby Dick." Books have become a prop for the pretentious. "Look how smart I am," the books is trying to tell you. "I can read James Joyce. I understand Herman Melville." Bullshit. The small group of people I know who love books and who love to write do it in private. These are private acts, not public acts. But we live in a hyper-performative society, where it doesn't matter whether you're doing something or not, only that other people see you doing what you're doing. In other words, if no one witnesses you reading or writing, then you can't possibly be doing either. People like the idea of being a reader or being a writer, not the actuality of it, which is that no one knows you're reading or writing. I don't know why I'm ranting about this. Probably because I saw some mook reading "Moby Dick" in Starbucks this morning. I mean, he wasn't reading it. He was mostly looking up from the book to confirm that others were looking at him reading it.

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